Machine
- As machines get to be more and more like men, men will come to be more like machines.
-- Joseph Wood Krutch
- To me, there is something superbly symbolic in the fact that an astronaut, sent up as assistant to a series of computers, found that he worked more accurately and more intelligently than they. Inside the capsule, man is still in charge.
-- Adlai E Stevenson
- A tool is but the extension of a man's hand, and a machine is but a complex tool. He that invents a machine augments the power of man and the well-being of mankind.
-- Henry Ward Beecher
- Men have become tools of their tools.
-- Henry David Thoreau
- One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.
-- Elbert Hubbard
- To curb the machine and limit art to handicraft is a denial of opportunity.
-- Lewis Mumford
- On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.
-- Oscar Wilde
- The machine unmakes the man. Now that the machine is so perfect, the engineer is nobody.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Majority
- There is one body that knows more than anybody, and that is everybody.
-- Alexandre de Talleyrand-Périgord
- Any man more right than his neighbors, constitutes a majority of one.
-- Henry David Thoreau
- It never troubles the wolf how many the sheep may be.
-- Vergil
- We go by the major vote, and if the majority are insane, the sane must go to the hospital.
-- Horace Mann
- One, with God, is always a majority, but many a martyr has been burned at the stake while the votes were being counted.
-- Thomas B. Reed
- When you get too big a majority, you're immediately in trouble.
-- Sam Rayburn
- The voice of the majority is no proof of justice.
-- Johann von Schiller
- It is my principle that the will of the majority should always prevail.
-- Thomas Jefferson
- Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform.
-- Mark Twain
Man
- Men are men before they are lawyers, or physicians, or merchants, or manufacturers; and if you make them capable and sensible men, they will make themselves capable and sensible lawyers or physicians.
-- John Stuart Mill
- All the world's a stage,
And all the men and merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts....
-- William Shakespeare
- The ablest man I ever met is the man you think you are.
-- Franklin Delano Roosevelt
- Man is a piece of the universe made alive.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- All that I care to know is that a man is a human being--that is enough for me; he can't be any worse.
-- Mark Twain
- I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample under foot. Men are not superior by reason of the accidents of race or color. They are superior who have the best heart--the best brain. The superior man ... stands erect by bending above the fallen. He rises by lifting others.
-- Robert Green Ingersoll
- Man is a special being, and if left to himself, in an isolated condition, would be one of the weakest creatures; but associated with his kind, he works wonders.
-- Daniel Webster
- Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.
-- Albert Camus
- Man is a political animal by nature; he is a scientist by chance or choice; he is a moralist because he is a man.
-- Hans J. Morgenthau
- Man is a reasoning rather than a reasonable animal.
-- Alexander Hamilton
- The awareness that we are all human beings together has become lost in war and through politics.
-- Albert Schweitzer
- No man is an island entire of itself; every man is part of the main ... Any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
-- John Donne
Manners
- Nothing so much prevents our being natural as the desire of appearing so.
-- François de La Rochefoucauld
- Nowadays, manners are easy and life is hard.
-- Benjamin Disraeli
- Manners easily and rapidly mature into morals.
-- Horace Mann
- A man's own good breeding is the best security against other people's ill manners.
-- Lord Chesterfield
- To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered.
-- Voltaire
- A man's own manner and character is what most becomes him.
-- Cicero
- Savages we call them because their manners differ from ours.
-- Benjamin Franklin
- It is a mistake that there is no bath that will cure people's manners, but drowning would help.
-- Mark Twain
Marriage
- I have always thought that every woman should marry, and no man.
-- Benjamin Disraeli
- Men marry to make an end; women to make a beginning.
-- Alexis Dupuy
- God help the man who won't marry until he finds a perfect woman, and God help him still more if he finds her.
-- Benjamin Tillett
- Marriage is that relation between man and woman in which the independence is equal, the dependence mutual, and the obligation reciprocal.
-- Louis K. Anspacher
- Marriage is the torment of one, the felicity of two, the strife and enmity of three.
-- Washington Irving
- Men marry because they are tired; women because they are curious. Both are disappointed.
-- Oscar Wilde
- Well-married, a man is winged: ill-matched, he is shackled.
-- Henry Ward Beecher
- The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality, but must live with a character.
-- Peter DeVries
- A successful marriage is an edifice that must be rebuilt every day.
-- André Maurois
- Marriage is our last, best chance to grow up.
-- Joseph Barth
- I guess the only way to stop divorce is to stop marriage.
-- Will Rogers
- It takes two to make a marriage a success and only one to make it a failure.
-- Herbert Samuel
- The bonds of matrimony are like any other bonds--they mature slowly.
-- Peter De Vries
- Where there's marriage without love, there will be love without marriage.
-- Benjamin Franklin
- Marriage resembles a pair of shears, so joined that they cannot be separated; often moving in opposite directions, yet always punishing any one who comes between them.
-- Sydney Smith
Martyr
- I think the most uncomfortable thing about martyrs is that they look down on people who aren't.
-- Samuel N. Behrman
- A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
-- Oscar Wilde
- The way of the world is, to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones.
-- Nathaniel Howe
- It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.
-- Horace Mann
- It is the cause and not merely the death that makes the martyr.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte
Maturity
- Maturity is the time of life when, if you had the time, you'd have the time of your life.
-- Anonymous
- By the age of twenty, any young man should know whether or not he is to be a specialist and just where his tastes lie. By postponing the question we have set on immaturity a premium which controls most American personality to its deathbed.
-- Robert S. Hillyer
- Only the middle-aged have all their five senses in the keeping of their wits.
-- Hervey Allen
- The immature man wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mature man wants to live humanely for one.
-- Wilhelm Stekel
- Maturity is often more absurd than youth and very frequently is most unjust to youth.
-- Thomas A. Edison
Maxim
- All maxims have their antagonist maxims; proverbs should be sold in pairs, a single one being but a half truth.
-- William Mathews
- Pithy sentences are like sharp nails which force truth upon our memory.
-- Denis Diderot
- Maxims are the condensed good sense of nations.
-- James Mackintosh
- A man of maxims only, is like a cyclops with one eye, and that in the back of his head.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- Maxims are like lawyers who must need to see but one side of the case.
-- Frank Gelett Burgess
- They are like the clue in the labyrinth, or the compass in the night.
-- Joseph Joubert
Meaning of Life
- The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
-- Walker Percy
- Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.
-- Jean-Paul Sartre
- The world is not to be put in order, the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison eith this order.
-- Henry Miller
- The real being, with no status, is always going in and out through the doors of your face.
-- Lin-Chi
- I am a part of all that I have met.
-- Alfred Lord Tennyson
- Hide your body in the Big Dipper.
-- Zen Saying
- Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding.
-- Tao te Ching
- In my hut this spring, there is nothing -- there is everything!
-- Sodo
- The mountains, rivers, earth, grasses, trees, and forests are always emanating a subtle, precious light, day and night, always emanating a subtle, precious sound, demonstrating and expounding to all people the unsurpassed ultimate truth.
-- Yuan-Sou
- If you seek, how is that different from pursuing sound and form? If you don't seek, how are you different from earth, wood, or stone? You must seek without seeking.
-- Fo-Yan
- Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
-- Wallace Stevens
- How could drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
- The journey is the reward.
-- Chinese Proverb
- This is it. There are no hidden meanings. All that mystical stuff is just what's so.
-- Werner Erhard
Medicine
- He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind, and all the worse for the fishes.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes
- God heals and the doctor takes the fee.
-- Benjamin Franklin
- The only profession that labors incessantly to destroy the reason for its own existence.
-- James Bryce
Mediocrity
- A mediocre idea that generates enthusiasm will go further than a great idea that inspires no one.
-- Mary Kay Ash
- Everything I've ever done was out of fear of being mediocre.
-- Chet Atkins
- Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best.
-- Max Beerbohm
- Mediocre men often have the most acquired knowledge.
-- Claude Bernard
- People who are unable to motivate themselves must be content with mediocrity, no matter how impressive their other talents.
-- Andrew Carnegie
- The success of many books is due to the affinity between the mediocrity of the author's ideas and those of the public.
-- Nicolas Chamfort
- Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.
-- Arthur Conan Doyle
- Only the mediocre are always at their best.
-- Jean Giraudoux
- Mediocrity obtains more with application than superiority without it.
-- Balthasar Gracian
- We must overcome the notion that we must be regular. It robs you of the chance to be extraordinary and leads you to the mediocre.
-- Uta Hagen
- Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.
-- Joseph Heller
- The very minute a thought is threatened with publicity it seems to shrink towards mediocrity.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes
- In the republic of mediocrity, genius is dangerous.
-- Robert G. Ingersoll
- In this country we encourage "creativity" among the mediocre, but real bursting creativity appalls us. We put it down as undisciplined, as somehow "too much."
-- Pauline Kael
- The appearance of a single great genius is more than equivalent to the birth of a hundred mediocrities.
-- Cesare Lombroso
- Getting ahead in a difficult profession requires avid faith in yourself. That is why some people with mediocre talent, but with great inner drive, go much further than people with vastly superior talent.
-- Sorphia Loren
- The general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind.
-- John Stuart Mill
- There is real magic in enthusiasm. It spells the difference between mediocrity and accomplishment.
-- Norman Vincent Peale
- Mediocrity is climbing molehills without sweating.
-- Icelandic Proverb
- "Mediocrity" doesn't mean average intelligence, it means an average intelligence that resents and envies its betters.
-- Ayn Rand
- Great innovators and original thinkers and artists attract the wrath of mediocrities as lightning.
-- Theodor Reik
- Egotism is nature's compensation for mediocrity.
-- L.A. Safian
- Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius.
-- --Fulton J. Sheen
- Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world.
-- Lily Tomlin
- A steady salary is an invitation to mediocrity.
-- Anonymous
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